Sarah Tavel joined Pinterest in 2012 as their first Product Manager when the company had just a handful of employees. She helped scale it through hypergrowth, launching their first search and recommendations features. Here are the key lessons she’s shared from that experience.
Lesson 1: MAUs Are a Leaky Bucket
Early on, Pinterest’s growth team set their objective to increase Monthly Active Users. It seemed intuitive—MAUs is what social networks report, after all.
The problem: While MAUs increased, they had a leaky bucket. New users poured in but churned out just as fast.
The fix: They shifted focus from MAUs to Weekly Active Pinners (WAPers)—users who completed the core action at least once per week. This forced them to care about engagement, not just acquisition.
“People often say that what you measure, improves. While true, it overlooks how strategic the decision of what you measure is. If you get stuck measuring the wrong thing, you could end up wasting your time on the wrong initiatives.”
Lesson 2: Full-Stack Teams Changed Everything
Pinterest initially had siloed teams—separate engineering, design, and product orgs. Moving to full-stack teams (cross-functional pods owning end-to-end features) was transformational.
“When we switched to full stack teams, it was night and day. Everything moved faster, we could prioritize better, we built better products, and everyone was a lot happier.”
Lesson 3: Balance User Feedback with Data
Your most vocal users aren’t representative of your future users.
“If you build every feature your users ask for, you’ll end up with a very small, highly engaged user base.”
Pinterest had to make changes that irritated power users but unlocked growth for the next 100 million users. The key: listen to data over the vocal minority, communicate changes clearly, and be willing to ignore feedback when data points elsewhere.
Lesson 4: The Core Action is Everything
Pinterest’s entire product revolves around pinning. Every feature decision was evaluated against: “Does this help users pin more?”
The discovery engine creates a virtuous loop:
- More pins → Better understanding of user interests
- Better understanding → Better recommendations
- Better recommendations → More pins
This flywheel made the product self-improving simply by users using it.
Lesson 5: Hiring for Hypergrowth
In hypergrowth, you’re constantly hiring people to do jobs that didn’t exist six months ago. Tavel emphasized hiring for learning agility over specific experience—people who could figure out new problems as the company evolved.
Key Takeaway: The Pinterest scaling experience reinforced that growth without engagement is vanity. Measure what matters (core action completion), organize teams for speed (full-stack), and optimize for your next 100M users, not your current vocal minority.
What lessons have you learned scaling products through hypergrowth phases?